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‘I can never be bigger than the instrument’ ... Anna Von Hausswolff.
Dead Magic … Anna von Hausswolff. Photograph: film company handout
Dead Magic … Anna von Hausswolff. Photograph: film company handout

Anna von Hausswolff: 'It’s still weird to see a woman screaming her nuts out'

This article is more than 6 years old

The Swedish musician’s songs – gothic organ creations filled with doomy mystery – may confuse awards juries, but are winning her a fervent audience. She talks about imagination, magical thinking, and the grandeur of her chosen instrument

Anna von Hausswolff pokes her head around the imposing wooden door to Gothenburg’s Örgryte New Church, grinning as if welcoming a camera crew to her very own episode of MTV Crypts. This gothic edifice is a second home for the 31-year-old musician, who holes up here for days playing its two giant pipe organs. She leads the way through the ornately decorated interior and up a draughty spiral staircase, unlocking doors with giant storybook keys, and turns on the bigger of the two organs, which starts breathing heavily.

The instrument, she explains while showing off its complex innards, is a new replica of a 400-year-old beast whose characterful drone consistently eluded the engineers tasked with its painstaking recreation. Eventually, they deduced that the 4,000 original pipes contained tin, lead and arsenic, and understood that true authenticity would entail a little poison.

This kind of organ-related lore is what fires Von Hausswolff’s mind. “It contributes inspiration, ideas, vision, ambition, because I can never be bigger than the instrument – there will always be something that I’ve missed,” she enthuses later, sitting in her rented studio in Haga, Gothenburg’s old town. “I would need to spend a lifetime with an organ to truly understand it, and I’m just meeting it for a brief period of time. It maintains its secrets long after I’m done with it.”

‘I still get that feeling that I’m in a place I shouldn’t be’ … Von Hausswolff at a church organ. Photograph: Anders Nydam

When Von Hausswolff started writing her fourth album, Dead Magic, her imagination – once the source of rich apocalyptic visions – felt similarly under lock and key. Her previous record, 2015’s The Miraculous, explored the power of fantasy, a concept she now felt had returned to mock her. “I felt passive and hopeless, as if my mind was somehow contrasting me preaching about what the imagination could do and how we’re so magical,” she says. “I went into this place where nothing felt magical, and my imagination was telling me that I didn’t have any, as if it was degrading and destroying itself.”

She forced herself to write through the hopelessness, and started finding “some kind of curiosity” in the material, which she ultimately recorded in Copenhagen’s Marble Church with lauded drone producer Randall Dunn. What was originally intended to be one relentless album-length song ended up as five lengthy pieces that contemplate existence’s awe-inspiring insignificance: bodies “surrounded by black magic sky”, dissolving “into emptiness”. Somehow, it’s not bleak: melding the heft of doom metal, dustbowl drone and liturgical grandeur, Dead Magic is oddly uplifting and exhilarating thanks to Von Hausswolff’s occasional gnarled shrieks.

Dead Magic remains an elusive concept to its author, but it has something to do with the strange, transcendental quality of creativity. As well as reactivating her own imagination, Von Hausswolff hopes that the record encourages listeners to embrace mystery in the face of an “extremely materialistic society where everything needs to be explained”, she says. “I think it’s making people lazy because they don’t really get a chance to use their own heads and create their own truths. I’m not blaming people because I do it myself; I just want to find the needle to pop the bubble.”

Video: The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra, from latest album Dead Magic

Total artistic freedom was the norm in Von Hausswolff’s childhood – her father is Carl Michael von Hausswolff, an enfant terrible of the Swedish avant garde. Her parents split when Anna was two, her mother “super tired of the decadent art world of the Swedish 1990s and the exhibitionist artists”, she says. When she was seven, she watched her father give a performance in which he was locked in a bath tub and apparently set on fire. “It was just absurd,” she says, amused. “[I thought:] ‘Why is my mother just sitting here looking at it?’ I knew that he was going to survive, but it was still a feeling of fear, although once he came out of the bathtub I thought he was a superhero because he had survived death. It was a very mixed emotion.”

She grew up surrounded by misfits – Haga was a grimy punk haven in the 90s before being gentrified to resemble toy-town Scandinavia – but says her parents supported her initial, sensible plan to become an architect, inspired by the utopian Buckminster Fuller. Still, music took over, followed by an obsession with her chosen instrument. It inspires a particular fervour in its (predominantly male) devotees. In the cab to the studio, I had pointed out an impressive church. “That church is beautiful!” Von Hausswolff said, turning from the passenger seat. “But the pipe organ is small!”

It is entirely predictable that Von Hausswolff regularly encounters surprise at the fact that a petite, blonde, exuberant woman plays doom rock on an instrument the size of a bungalow. “That’s what I hear all the time,” she says. “‘But you’re so nice!’ I don’t feel like I need to belong to a group or conform to perceptions of what a group of people who play a certain type of music look like.” She wears variations on the same shirt and jeans every day, but makes one concession to the idea that organists are massive goths: “I can’t shy away from the fact that I like the colour black,” she says.

Organ obsessive ... Anna von Hausswolff performing live at Club to Club festival in Turin, in 2016. Photograph: Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Never mind other people’s perceptions; she’s more perplexed by her reaction to her own music. “When I start becoming ugly, or raw or unfiltered, that’s also when the most interesting things happen,” she says. “But I feel shame because that’s not how you’re supposed to present yourself as a female. I’m quite a modern girl – and luckily in Sweden we have a very open mind towards women in arts – but I still get that feeling that I’m in a place I shouldn’t be, doing things you really shouldn’t do, like I’m fighting the ideals projected down from our ancestors.”

The paucity of women in extreme music means these stereotypes are even tougher to break: “They have to defend what they’re doing so hard because they’re in a male-dominated genre, so there’s more focus on them being female than on their work. It’s still weird for people to see someone screaming her nuts out, playing loud music. I think, how can it be shocking any more? We still haven’t broken down our idea of how the genders should be.” Old, male pipe organ custodians just about manage to avoid patting her on the head when they show her around their instruments. “Usually I just smile and let the music speak for itself, and then afterwards they’re always shocked and don’t know what to say any more.”

As a result, nobody really knows how to categorise her music. She’s too experimental for pop, too poppy for experimental, and fits as happily on the bill of a metal festival as a jazz festival. Von Hausswolff refused to submit her last album for the Swedish Grammi awards – not her style – but the committee decided they needed a representative of the underground. Still, they had to call her dad to decide which category to put her in, and settled on rock when they nominated The Miraculous in 2016. “But it’s funny that not even they can figure out where to place me,” Von Hausswolff says, pleased to be as elusive as her muse.

  • Dead Magic by Anna von Hausswolff is out now on City Slang

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